Historic Gridded Standardised Precipitation Index for the United Kingdom 1862-2015 (generated using gamma distribution with standard period 1961-2010) v4

5km gridded Standardised Precipitation Index (SPI) data for Great Britain, which is a drought index based on the probability of precipitation for a given accumulation period as defined by McKee et al [1]. There are seven accumulation periods: 1, 3, 6, 9, 12, 18, 24 months and for each period SPI is calculated for each of the twelve calendar months. Note that values in monthly (and for longer accumulation periods also annual) time series of the data therefore are likely to be autocorrelated. The standard period which was used to fit the gamma distribution is 1961-2010. The dataset covers the period from 1862 to 2015.

This version supersedes previous versions (version 2 and 3) of the same dataset due to minor errors in the data files.

NOTE: the difference between this dataset with the previously published dataset "Gridded Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) using gamma distribution with standard period 1961-2010 for Great Britain [SPIgamma61-10]" (Tanguy et al., 2015; https://doi.org/10.5285/94c9eaa3-a178-4de4-8905-dbfab03b69a0) , apart from the temporal and spatial extent, is the underlying rainfall data from which SPI was calculated. In the previously published dataset, CEH-GEAR (Tanguy et al., 2014; https://doi.org/10.5285/5dc179dc-f692-49ba-9326-a6893a503f6e) was used, whereas in this new version, Met Office 5km rainfall grids were used (see supporting information for more details). The methodology to calculate SPI is the same in the two datasets.

Where/When

Study area

Temporal extent

1862-01-01 to
2015-12-31

Quality

Lineage SPI is calculated as originally defined in [1]. SPI is based on the cumulative probability of a given rainfall amount occurring at a location. The historic rainfall data of the station is fitted to a statistical distribution. For this dataset, the statistical distribution used is the gamma distribution, which has been extensively used and is recommended as a default choice for Europe by [2]. The L-moments method was used to estimate the gamma distribution parameters, as the maximum likehood method was failing to fit a realistic distribution in some isolated cases. To calculate SPI, the R package SCI was used, but modified to use L-moments (instead of Maximum Likelihood). The input data used is the monthly rainfall grids from the Met Office 5km gridded rainfall product. In this version of the dataset (version 4), the monthly rainfall grids from 1960 to 2000 was derived from the Met Office 5-km daily rainfall grids, to address some localised issues that were found in the Met Office monthly rainfall grids.